MANTRA FOR HOUSEPLANTS
Plants subjected to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix didn’t survive.

At the end of experiment, plants exposed to Ravi Shankar’s East Indian sitar lean toward the sound and grow more luxuriantly than the control plants, wrote Dorothy Retallak in The sound of music and plants (1973). So at breakfast we decide to build a a radiomenu of dozen mantras for the houseplants. From the abandoned vinyl tweets classified with the bird’s names—found on Place du Jeu de Balle after the daily marché aux puces—until the conference Soigner les plantes par la musique by the belgian agronomist Yannick Van Eyck, where the leitmotiv is electroculture. In between: an original piece of Johnny Haway’s around the acoustic vibration of the botanical copper pyramid at the conference’s after, the loop of an empty 45 groove created cutting the 45 and recomposing it remixed with an astonishing choranic sura, repetition of six chosen letters of Teaching a plant the alphabet by John Baldessari, fritkot’s litany of various sauces, the sound of the cutting-bones at the old abattoir of Anderlecht intersecated with Ravi Shankar’s sitar, for example. A mantric maniac morning chamber soundsystem.

Oliver Scharpf and Davide Cascio in residence in Bruxelles between March 27th and April 5th 2015

lenght: 43 min
language: french, english, arabic
tags: mantra, music, plants, fieldrecording, electroculture, sauce samurai